Search Engine Optimization-SEO Best Practices

From a visitor’s perspective, it is best to learn to search with keywords that will bring up the most relevant site in a jiffy. From the webmaster’s perspective, it is ideal if their site comes up on the top of the search engine results page whenever a searcher searches with relevant keywords.

This is the most desirable result.

However, this is not easily achievable. There is no specific method or process to solve this or to arrive at a solution, it is a practice. Just uploading fresh content often will not ensure decent rankings, and neither will incoming links from hundreds of sites. To some extent these may help, if these links are from relevant, authoritative sites.

The whole online promotions and Search engine optimization process is very dynamic.I never get tired of saying that.And it is true.

For instance, you may find that a site, probably with content that was updated five months back, ranking very high on search engines. So, it is definitely not content that is of always weighed heavily, it is important but at the end of the day, I think what is important is how popular your site is even when there is not much of fresh content being uploaded. It is essential that the site has enough material to pull visitors all the time. Of course, it does not mean that a site that does not update content very often has stopped promoting the site.You will find that these sites have links across good authoritative sites and are well represented on social networking sites as well.

The point I am making here is that there is a need for continuous online promotions and an online strategy that matches the current search requirement. A Webmaster needs to apply all of this in order to increase the visitors or traffic to the site. It is important that your site is well represented across all channels online. If you cannot add fresh content to your site on a regular basis, what you could do is ensure that you participate in forum discussions, twit about your business and participate. Also, try to get links from good authoritative sites, this will help because more people will know about your site and some will definitely drop in. Just make your presence felt, participate and help others.

In order to be in sync with your visitors, it is best to find out their favourite haunts and befriend them, help them and that will be the beginning of a relationship that can last forever. The more you talk to them the more you will find what they, what they are searching for. This is very valuable as it will help in fine tuning your site to your visitors needs.

Out of sight, out of mind. This is a webmaster’s nightmare. Do not let it happen to your sites. Keep the channels of communication open. Keep up the visibility at all times.

To best explain the evolution of websites, web site design, and SEO, I will divide this article into three phases-

Phase I- The Bygone era of website design and Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

In the 90s when the internet started to get popular in terms of businesses starting to have a presence on the internet; I remember, it still took a lot of convincing for many businesses, especially small business owners to consider having an online presence. Back then, having an online presence was mostly like displaying a brochure online.  Many of these online businesses would put up their brochures online. That’s it. From the design perspective, businesses would not want to spend much on designing. Sometimes the whole page would be a huge image, sometimes just a few lines of text with contact numbers and an email id. Only a few businesses would perhaps have a full fledged website. As far as Search engine optimization goes, the maximum that Search Engine Optimizers (SEO was coming into being then and there weren’t really that many people doing SEO) could do was to provide titles, descriptions, and keyword Meta tags, and suggest the sites to search engines and search directories. The part that I liked back then is the ease with which web sites could rank with a relevant keyword; understandable since there were hardly that many sites competing, and SEO was even rarer!

Here, I will draw an analogy with constructing a home or building. We need a house, we do not have a house …so what do we do?

We construct a basic, very functional house; it serves the purpose, but is not really visually appealing. It’s just that; a house with rooms and walls to serve a purpose. I guess there wasn’t time or the need to mull over the finer aspects like making it attractive, it has to be constructed, and so be it.

Phase II- The evolving era of website designing and Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

With the availabilty of better tools, and more service providers coming into the field, the internet got a big boost, a new era of web designers were born, they design really beautiful web sites, with frames, with animations, flash, etc. But are these sites user friendly? Can people get to these sites? Do these sites download fast? Are they accessible?
From the SEO perspective, many search engines could not index such websites, because of heavy applications and images, websites took ages to download. That took away the patience of the visitors as well. We created beautiful websites but not many could find them! Finally when they did, they could not find everything on the site!

Again, if we draw an analogy with constructing a building, we construct beautiful home, spend huge amount of money to make it look beautiful, but are these homes safe, practical, and functional too?

Phase III -The new generation of web sites, website designers, and Search Engine Optimizers

We have a new generation of web designers who are familiar with SEO (Search Engine Optimization) nuances, they design keeping in mind various factors so that the end result is a perfect balance beauty and functionality. Striking this cord of course is not easy, one has to test and test and test constantly.

The point that is evident today is that we will see designers, developers, and Search Engine Optimizers work together. Today, almost everyone who has access to the internet has either shopped online, has downloaded eBooks, bought tickets, and much more. Websites are getting better and better, search engines results are very relevant these days.

And again, drawing an anology with constructing buildings; we have multi storied complexes that are functional and yet are not bad looking. A good amount of time is spent on planning and ensuring that there is a perfect marriage of beauty and functionality. The buildings are modern, eco friendly, and user friendly. Interesting!

Designing will continue to evolve and so will SEO, but they have to go hand in hand in order to provide the best to the end users. In summary, website designing has evolved into a creative science, creating website’s that are user friendly, good looking, and SEO friendly too!

For more on SEO and Website design, you can also check out this article on SEO and best practices for Website Designing that I wrote some time back.

Most internet marketers today focus on PPC to get them their leads online. While it is true that PPC is the fastest and the most effective way of generating leads; can we ignore leads that we get from SEO efforts?

Your best practices for lead generation should also include SEO lead generation.

SEO impacts almost all your online activities. Be it submitting news to PR sites, optimizing content in the Social networking sites or even getting affiliates for your products/ services.

Many visitors visit your site from links that have been acquired because of SEO efforts. These visits may many at times end in a conversion. Since SEO percolates down to almost each and every medium- search, Social media, news sites, affiliate sites, the chances of visitors coming in to your site from these sources are very high.

The need for today is to have a holistic online marketing strategy. The strategy should not ignore the leads that your website receives from SEO efforts. Today people are not solely dependent on search engines to provide them the answers, most people use Social networking sites. Marketers cannot effort to miss out on the opportunities available from Social networking sites.

Search Engine Optimization, even though a slow process, once it gets going, it develops a network so wide that there is no stopping the benefits that you as a marketer can reap from it.

Go ahead and track the leads that come through your SEO and Social networking efforts. After all, for SEO leads you won’t have to pay for every click. If you are focused on lead generation, make sure that all your pages, especially the SEO optimized content  pages (and not just the landing pages that are created specifically for PPC), have your forms so that you can track easily which pages are bringing in the leads. Go on, work on both SEO, Social medial marketing, and PPC, and watch your revenues grow.

The most important investment that you can make for SEO is time. Just find time to work on optimizing the content on your own site and Social networking sites. You can hire a SEO professional who can to do this for you, if you do not have that much time to spare. Spread your content and links all over the internet. You will find that the benefits of SEO are manifold.

In  my earlier post I touched upon the “Visitors” and “Traffic Overview” sections of the Google Analytics report, today I will take up the “Content” section of the Analytics report. It is a part that will specially help you in analyzing your SEO efforts. You can reach the content part from the dashboard in two easy steps as shown below:
 
 

What is there in the content section of Google Analytics?

To me this is the most interesting section; I can spend a lot of time here. You can find valuable little gems of information here. I just love it!
The content section provides the details such as- Content overview, top content, content by title, content drilldown, Top landing pages, Top exit pages, and In-page Analytics (this one is my favourites)

Top content-This gives you the most viewed pages of your site.

The Google Analytics “About this report” summary on this page provides a very apt description of what to expect from this section and how to analyze it.

Content by title: Is the same as above but it is easier to read because it provides the titles of your top pages; you can quickly recognize the pages when you search your most viewed content by title. As mentioned in the report, you can optimize your pages based on bounce rates, exits etc.If your top content page has a  high bounce rate, it is critical that you revisit it in terms of design, content, and associated links on that page. It may also be that the title of the page is misleading; visitors come to your page expecting something and they get something else. And therefore bounce away from the page. Not good. But the good news is you can optimize these pages easily. You can test and find out if the newly optimized page fares better.SEO plays a huge part here because you may need to analyze the keywords, the title, and description tags, the anchor texts, and many more factors on each of these pages. Optimizing your page would mean working on almost all of these elements. On-page SEO is after all a sum total of various key elements of a page. Some of them may look not so significant and small, but their overall impact makes a significant difference in the page performance

Content Drilldown- This sections drills down to your second level pages and provides you the most popular ones. This kind of provides an insight on specific information your visitors are looking for. Again the bounce rate will tell you if you need to quickly optimize and work on making those pages better.

Top Landing pages: Essentially for your PPC landing pages, you can find out which of your landing pages are performing well.

Top Exit pages: These are pages from where the highest exits happenned.If these pages are your conversion check out page, I think these exits are absolutely fine. But if these are other regular content pages, there certainly is cause for concern. You may want to make these pages interactive and consider including deep internal links. This might help in capturing the attention of the exiting visitors so that they are persuaded into staying longer.

In-page Analytics: This is the best part. What this report does is show you how many clicks the various sections of your webpage receives. Absolutely awesome! You actually get to know where your traffic is headed, perhaps some of the visitors are not even clicking on the links that you really want them to; on the other hand they are perhaps going to some other page because the link to that page is more prominently positioned, or the visitors are actually interested in viewing that page.There are so many things you can derive from this section and work on, it is amazing. The information thta is hiding in the data is just waiting to be found. If you still have not installed an analytics package for your website, my suggestion would be to go ahead and get a free package installed, you will never regret it. And if you find it useful, please drop by and post a line:)

Measuring SEO results and effectiveness; how to find out if your SEO efforts are bearing fruits.

Now that you have website that is live and has gone through Search Engine Optimization (SEO), I am sure you would want to find out if your website is getting traffic because of your SEO efforts. Typically, it may be a good idea to wait for at least six months before you start evaluating your SEO efforts.It takes a while for SEO effectiveness to show up in terms of SEO rankings, traffic etc.

Here is what you can implement in order to get a good idea about traffic to your website -

1.Web Analytics tool

You will need a tool that will help you get data on traffic, keywords etc. Get Google Analytics installed on your website, it is free and provides you a lot of relevant data. Essentially targeted towards tracking paid advertising, it also provides data on organic or natural results.

Go to – http://www.google.com/analytics/

If you already have a Google account, you can login using that id or register for a new account. Before that you can get a taste of what Google Analytics all about out here-
http://www.google.com/analytics/tour.html

Google’s tutorials on analytics are very helpful. I will take up analytics in detail in my next post.

2. Google Webmaster tool

This is a very useful tool for measuring SEO effectiveness and results. I would recommend this to everyone who has a website. This is such a useful tool that it should by default be included in your planning and strategy.To start with go to the Google webmasters help page-
http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/

The tool will help you diagnose problems, it will tell you about your website’s accessibility issues, you will find out how many pages link to your site, which keywords were used to reach your site and much much more.

3. Alexa

Alexa will give you an idea about your website’s popularity but it is not absolutely entirely correct since it depends of various factors.

I will take up each of these tools separately in my subsequent posts.But for now, go ahead and get registered for Google Analytics and webmaster tools account. I promise you, these tools will help you in measuring your SEO results to a large extent.

Ethical SEO or ethical Search Engine Optimization, in my opinion, should form the basis of promoting your website online.It is one of the most important aspects of promoting your website .This website is all about SEO best practices , and following ethical Search Engine Optimization while promoting your website online, is the verry essence of SEO best practices.

SEO is very often referred by ethical SEO or black hat SEO.

SEO has evolved into a field that has a lot of demand today. Everyone wants their website to rank within the first 10 results of the major search engines for the most competitive keywords. Today the websites have doubled-tripled but they are competing for the same space.

This has led to services that promise ranking in the top ten in all the major search engines instantly.SEO as such cannot deliver results instantly ever. SEO works on all aspects of your website elements to get your website prepared for competition.

Any instant results or promises of getting your website to rank within the top ten results should set the alarm bells ringing. Believe me no one can promise you top rankings for a specific keyword which is highly popular and competitive. Every site is different and SEO experts work on the USP for each website, some keywords may work for you and some may not. Just because you do not rank for a very popular keyword, it does not automatically follow that your website will not be successful in attracting and retaining visitors. It is in fact very possible to set up your website for success without ranking on top for all the popular keywords. A successful ethical SEO strategy is all about implementing a SEO plan tailored for your website only. SEO experts will not ever ask you to get into any of these instant ranking schemes especially if they have been in the field for quite some time. These promises are usually made by individuals or companies who are not here for the long haul but are fly by night operators.

Before embarking on a SEO project make sure you do a thorough reference check on the SEO company/individual. Black hat SEO may be successful for a bit but if your website gets caught you will be out of the search engines index within no time. Getting your website back in the search engine index is quite a challenging task. More often than not, website owners are not aware of the kind of work the SEO Company did for them. Undoing work that you may not be aware of can be a painful task.

If you want your website to gain visibility fast, the best way to do so would be to start advertising on Google, Yahoo! In the meantime keep working on making your website Search engine and user friendly (Meaning ethical and well planned SEO work)

Most of us have a social networking presence; try to make the most of your social network connections. They will certainly help you gain visibility. Ethical SEO is all about a SEO strategy that involves focused planning so that your target audience becomes aware of your website. It is about improving SEO, about workng on optimizing the SEO perfomance, about analyzing current results inorder to make faster and focused progress . It is about making your website search engine and user compliant.

Here are some articles that you might want to look up if you have launched a site, or if you wish to get information on ethical SEO (Search Engine Optimization).

Linking for users
10 SEO tips to improve Search Engine Ranking
Natural search engine optimization
Best Practices for writing effective Description Meta tags
Best Practices-Title tags- How to use titles in Web pages
Ranking for highly Competitive keywords, Is that so important

Top Ten Search Engines

A study of some web sites and my web site revealed that the
below-mentioned search engines make up the top 10 search engines. Though there is nothing new about this, most of us know that Google and Yahoo! account for the maximum volume of traffic. I wanted to analyze the traffic to get an insight into other not so evident stuff:-

Google
Yahoo
Ask
Bing
Altavista
Lycos
AOL

I did not quite drill down to the ten search engines chiefly because 99% of the search was contributed by the above mentioned search engines.So essentially, it is Google and Yahoo that rules supreme. Google accounting for 70 % of the visits.The balance is largely Yahoo, Ask, and Bing. There are a couple of reasons for this. The majority of people I know Google more than they Yahoo! Yahoo! seems to be more of a destination for current news, social networking, flickr etc.It is popular for searching as well, but somehow not as popular as Google.

Another interesting thing i noticed was the depth and length of visit. Yahoo! sent me visitors who stayed on my web site longer and went through many pages.Even though the number of visits were less than Google, the visitors that yahoo!sent me seemed to be more focused and relevant. Believe me, I just scratched the surface, the amount of data that Internet Marketers can use from the data available is amazing!

The other reason is the popularity of social networking sites such as Facebook, twitter, LinkedIn, Stumbleupon, and others. If you are active on the social networking circle, you will find a lot of referrals from these sites.End of the day, it is desirable that you get visits from search engines as well as referrals that way you know you have been successful in promoting your web sites effectively through all the channels.

Finding out which are the top search engines and social networking sites that send you the highest number of visitors is important.It will enable you to focus and optimize your efforts in maximizing traffic from to get more traffic from the search engines and referral sites that have the potential to send relevant traffic your way.

You may also check your search engine ranking on these popular sites and find out how well your site does for your relevant keywords.

Analyzing your search traffic regularly will enable you to achieve results that are in tune with your objective.

Well, you could argue and say, hey I have a website that has unique content, it downloads fast, and I update it often. The content is very useful for visitors.

So why exactly do I need to optimize it? I am offering valuable advice and content, all for free; shouldn’t the search engines give it priority naturally? After all my web site is providing value to the target audience?

I would say yes, it is true you are keeping your commitment of providing a valuable service to your potential customers but…

There are millions and millions of websites out there; exactly with the same objective, who do you think the search engines will prefer?

Think about it. You have created an amazingly beautiful and valuable creation but no one knows how to get there. You will need a little bit of help from everybody to find this creation of yours. You need to help people and search engines to help you.

Just like there are landmarks that tell you which way you are headed, or street signs that tell you that up ahead there is a restaurant etc , you need to find a way to communicate to people and search engines that your web site exists and that it is one gem of a web site! Search engine optimizing your web site does that for you.

Little things like providing an appropriate title to each of your web page, and meta tags…these elements are small but they have an incremental effect on your website’s visibility.

You will need to couple your SEO efforts with What we call in the tradition marketing, word of mouth. It helps tremendously to shout out, tell your friends to check out your web site, request then to refer it. Social networking optimization is another way of providing your web site the required push. Include your URL everywhere, signature lines, your Facebook profiles, LinkedIn, twitter updates…

Search engines have their own algorithms; they have tools that tell them what is being searched and which sites are more popular.

And this is just the beginning.

Is your website new? And are you desperate to get on top of search results?

Indeed it may seem like an uphill task to get your website to rank well in the major search engines when you have just about launched your brand new website.The enormity of the task may just make you desperate enough to try any means to get to the top of search results.

No matter what, I would advise you to be patient and not resort to claims from many operators who wish to convince you to use their software or their services in order to rank within the top ten search results. Sometimes there is a money back guarantee attached to it as well!

Incredible!

I would advise you to not pay heed to any of these tall claims. SEO is not something that can be applied and experienced immediately. Remember the sites that are ranking well have put in a lot of effort to be where they are now.

All is not lost though…and things are not really that desolate for a new web site. If you are launching your website now for a market that is already saturated with exiting established sites, you still have a good chance to gain visibility.

Your new website competition will be immense and it will certainly be a challenging task to produce results immediately. But with time, patience, and the correct SEO techniques everything is possible.

(image taken from fivegulf.com)

There are disadvantages and believe it or not advantages of working on Search engine optimizing a brand new site.

Let me sum up the disadvantages first-

1. If your web site caters to an already over saturated market, it will indeed be a tough task to rank…but not impossible.

2. Making the website visible to the online audience through SEO efforts is a time taking process.

3. Your competition is already many steps ahead with thousands of incoming links and decent rankings.

4. And you are going to have to start with a PR 0.

Now for the Advantages of a brand new web site-

1. You can learn from others mistakes and successes.

2. You have the advantage of loads of data at the click of your mouse. Study your competitors websites, do a thorough research.

3. Run a short campaign on Google Adwords, find out which keywords work for you.

4.Your biggest advantage is the Social media, searchers no longer depend upon search engines for their answers, you can create attractive videos and upload it on to youtube and other popular video sites. Facebook, Linkedin and many other social networking sites offer various ways of promoting products and services  as well.

5. More importantly, just do things a little differently from what is already there in your competitors websites. Offer something of value for free.

In summary,  do not give up easily, give your efforts time. Use content that is original and is of value to your visitors.

Mix your online marketing efforts with paid and organic marketing so that you get results faster.

Wish you all the best and see you at the top!

The SEO basics for small businesses are just the same for any global business, barring a few focused changes. The below-mentioned SEO best practices can help small business owners attract visitors to their websites: -

1. SEO for Web page title optimization; you can check out this post that I wrote specifically for SEO title optimization. When optimizing a business that has a local presence, it might be a good idea to mention the name of the place that the business caters to.

2. SEO for Description Meta tag title; you can check out this post that I wrote specifically for the SEO description meta tag optimization. Since description allows 2-3 lines of descriptive text, make sure you define your business, the market it caters to etc. Any unique items etc, your USP should get clearly defined here.

3. You can check out my post on SEO tips for an overall optimization effort.

4. You can consider submitting your website to directories, especially local directories. Here is another post that I wrote on search directory submission that might help.

5. Submitting your website details like postal address phone number, URL to Google and Yahoo local will certainly ensure that your site will show up on searching.

6. Get linked: You can check out my earlier post on “Linking for users”. This will help you get an idea of who to link with.

7. Find out who your competitors link to and who links to them. This will help you zero in on a list of potential websites who might want to link to your website.

8. Search for websites that are very popular local destinations; it might be a good idea to write to them requesting them to add your business to their website; it might be of value to their target audience.

9. Register with Google Web analytics, it will give you a lot of valuable data. You can optimize your web site even more once you have an idea about the visitors.

10. You could try out Google AdWords for a short time, just experiment, if it does not work out, you can turn it off. Just keep your budget moderate so that you do not end up spending a whole lot of dollars without any returns. AdWords helps if you want to reach your audience instantly and you have offers that have special discounts, seasonal discounts etc.

This is not an exhaustive list, but this will certainly get you started. This list of SEO optimization is affordable for Small business owners. One suggetion would be to keep looking for ways by which they can have coverage through all the local directories, blogs, portals etc. Practicing local business SEO is key, and will most definitely help your SEO efforts.